Andes Rising

This is a mystery novel which combines ornithology, politics and a search for God that resembles the work of Joseph Conrad at his best...Andes Rising is a haunting and strange little book that will have you turning the pages slowly and going back to read passages again and again.

—The Santa Fe New Mexican

In James Munves’s novel Andes Rising the reader is confronted with a mystery. What happened to Thomas Cooper? A scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and attended the disarmament conference following World War II, he had quit his job, left his family, and gone off to Colombia, South America on an ornithological project undertaken by the Peace Corps. His friends and family have lost all track of him. Finally his mother persuades her rabbi to go down to Colombia and find out if Thomas is dead or alive. What the rabbi eventually finds is Thomas’s journal filled with notes about his bird studies, ruminations about life (to which the rabbi responds), and pages from the work of Chapman, the early 20th-century ornithologist who collected specimens for the Museum of Natural History. Flashing through all is a rare tanager with turquoise markings. The director of the project wants Thomas to bring in a specimen of this bird, "If what is being prepared is another extermination," Thomas writes, "I am not going to abet it by pushing another bird to extinction." But is he slowly going mad? Does he die in an avalanche, or is he somewhere among the birds of the Andes?

Andes Rising

Clothbound

An extraordinary exercise in drama, irony, arid erudition. I felt as though I were climbing rather than reading; the novel a kind of map or handbook in hand ...Let the reader beware. Ever so slowly the story is unmasked, is transformed into a parable.

—Daniel Berrigan

Excerpt from Andes Rising

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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 - 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."